Scalability and failover with SER

Two of the important things missing from SER have been simple ways of creating a scalable and redundant SIP infrastructure using only SER as software components. Why? Because such features are important elements of any SIP infrastructure.

There has been resistance from many: “This should be up to each system administrator, as each has own preferences”, “we shouldn’t push network engineering into SER, but concentrate on SIP”, “there are too many ways of doing it, we cannot possibly do all”

In fact, commercial SIP actors benefit from NOT having scalability and failover readily available. It means that potential competitors and innovators must invest more time and competence in building up their own basic infrastructure. And there is a market for commercial SIP scalability and failover solutions. The open-source community suffers.

The reality is that SIP deployments have different needs, people do have different preferences, and some solutions may be better or worse for given applications. However, this should not prevent us from trying to describe the different approaches and make sure SER can support the most widely used ones.

A thread on serdev has kickstarted this effort, and I have tried to summarize the scenarios so far on iptel.org. So, users or developers, describe your favorite scalability/failover scenario now and make sure it is taken into account in later SER versions!